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Alpha 20 Dev Diary


madmole

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*      Set zombies to different states of awareness from dumb to feral (seeing and hearing)

 

Any chance we could get options to adjust this and zombie speed and even headshot/bodyshot damage multipliers by zed class instead of globally? Being able to easily set up a custom mix of Romero type and 28 days type zeds would be nice for challenge variety without having to get into mods.

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17 hours ago, Morloc said:

 

Hi Zeal,

 

I'm thinking that one's unlikely since deadly falling damage (to enemies) was in the game at one time. It was changed, and eventually scaled back to what it is now to prevent defenses from being too effective. It would be nice if a really long fall would cripple, but I don't think they'll move in that direction. 

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc

True. I guess it would not be much of a survival game then, that said. I was watching the game for long time, and always wondered if there will be a way to make objects like cloth not be "glued" onto the next block over. But that's just a minor thing. Thank you Arch Necromancer.

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8 hours ago, Overkillengine said:

*      Set zombies to different states of awareness from dumb to feral (seeing and hearing)

 

Any chance we could get options to adjust this and zombie speed and even headshot/bodyshot damage multipliers by zed class instead of globally? Being able to easily set up a custom mix of Romero type and 28 days type zeds would be nice for challenge variety without having to get into mods.

Feral sense is currently just Off, Day, Night, All.

 

We don't plan on more options changes for A20. Maybe by gold. For now you can change some of that in entityclasses.xml.

Edited by faatal (see edit history)
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29 minutes ago, faatal said:

Feral sense is currently just Off, Day, Night, All.

 

We don't plan on more options changes for A20. Maybe by gold. For now you can change some of that in entities.xml.

But just to clarify, horde nights will override the "off" setting, correct? 

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@madmole @faatal @Gazz Hi.

Is there a chance 7 Days To Die will support FSR from AMD?

Today it became known that Unity now officially supports this technology, and this could significantly improve optimization even on older hardware.

 

For those readers who do not know what is it, here is the link:

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx-super-resolution

Edited by Survager (see edit history)
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1 hour ago, Survager said:

@madmole @faatal @Gazz Hi.

Is there a chance 7 Days To Die will support FSR from AMD?

Today it became known that Unity now officially supports this technology, and this could significantly improve optimization even on older hardware.

 

For those readers who do not know what is it, here is the link:

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx-super-resolution

Not likely. Any new graphics tech that Unity adds to the engine generally is done to the HD render pipeline (HDRP). We use the built in pipeline. Updating to HDRP is a large amount of work, so probably won't be done until our next game.

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6 hours ago, faatal said:

For now you can change some of that in entityclasses.xml.

 

Does that mean the feral sense distance can be set to different values per entity class?

 

If so, that's pretty sweet. You could have the normal or weaker zombies (like Arlene) have a higher sense distance, but the more "tank-like" zombies (like Big Momma) have a slightly decreased sense distance, so they'd be equally threatening but in different ways. And of course, screamers could be even more of a threat than they are now.

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1 hour ago, faatal said:

Not likely. Any new graphics tech that Unity adds to the engine generally is done to the HD render pipeline (HDRP). We use the built in pipeline. Updating to HDRP is a large amount of work, so probably won't be done until our next game.

so it's mean will be 7dtd  supported (big updates not fixes) for 1 or 2 years?

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22 minutes ago, khzmusik said:

 

Does that mean the feral sense distance can be set to different values per entity class?

 

If so, that's pretty sweet. You could have the normal or weaker zombies (like Arlene) have a higher sense distance, but the more "tank-like" zombies (like Big Momma) have a slightly decreased sense distance, so they'd be equally threatening but in different ways. And of course, screamers could be even more of a threat than they are now.

Yes, but it is a scale, not distance.

 

zombieTemplateMale is <property name="AIFeralSense" value="1.5"/>

Currently only zeds that are different are zbear at 1.2 and zdog at 1.6.

20 minutes ago, Matt115 said:

so it's mean will be 7dtd  supported (big updates not fixes) for 1 or 2 years?

It does not mean anything expect our next game will probably be HDRP.

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11 hours ago, faatal said:

Yes, but it is a scale, not distance.

 

zombieTemplateMale is <property name="AIFeralSense" value="1.5"/>

Currently only zeds that are different are zbear at 1.2 and zdog at 1.6.

It does not mean anything expect our next game will probably be HDRP.

 

Well, it also means at least one of your next games (probably 7D2D 2) will be a Unity game, which will disappoint Unreal engine worshippers who think that other engine is the holy grail 😁

 

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
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20 hours ago, faatal said:

It does not mean anything expect our next game will probably be HDRP.

Is Unity's Render Pipeline better that what you guys made? What are the differences? From what I read, They do mostly the same but yours is cheaper on the hardware and as of now I suspect it even runs better . 

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Good day to you, @faatal. A while ago it was mentioned something along the lines of a vehicle storage mod. Will that mod make it into a20? I was 'flabbergasted' that the most important vehicle mod in the game has gotten delayed and/or cut off  o__0 .

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On 7/17/2021 at 2:32 PM, Blake_ said:

Is Unity's Render Pipeline better that what you guys made? What are the differences? From what I read, They do mostly the same but yours is cheaper on the hardware and as of now I suspect it even runs better . 

Unity games don't make their own render pipeline. You use the built in one or one of the new scriptable ones. The scriptable ones let you make a ton of changes, but Unity is still doing the heavy lifting. Unity is still what talks to the graphics API (DX, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan).

On 7/18/2021 at 4:55 AM, Blake_ said:

Good day to you, @faatal. A while ago it was mentioned something along the lines of a vehicle storage mod. Will that mod make it into a20? I was 'flabbergasted' that the most important vehicle mod in the game has gotten delayed and/or cut off  o__0 .

Not in A20.

17 hours ago, Gobarg said:

I'm interested to know how the Devs are liking/disliking the new building menu and if we can get a peak? ;)

 

I think we all like it. Not sure why anyone would not. I think it is top secret at this point, so if I showed you, I would have to....

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3 hours ago, faatal said:

Unity games don't make their own render pipeline. You use the built in one or one of the new scriptable ones. The scriptable ones let you make a ton of changes, but Unity is still doing the heavy lifting. Unity is still what talks to the graphics API (DX, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan).

I see. While I didn't mean to imply that Unity doesn't do the rendering to any or some extent, the change is tougher than I thought, AND a ton of work, as it means chopping a lot of already-done code to get ... cool brand-new script-managed graphics in C# ? that sounds like a punch in the gut. 

 

BUT

 

You guys (probably) will eventually make the decision to chop your built-in one nevertheless. Why?

 

1-Because HDRP allows for a huge amount of graphics options for developers. 

2-HDRP supports DLSS natively. And 7dtd needs all the performance it can get.

3-HDRP supports Ray Tracing. 

 

 

Downsides to HDRP are training for artists and programmers, which might take a few weeks. That's a big one.

Edited by Blake_ (see edit history)
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13 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

I see. While I didn't mean to imply that Unity doesn't do the rendering to any or some extent, the change is tougher than I thought, AND a ton of work, as it means chopping a lot of already-done code to get ... cool brand-new script-managed graphics in C# ? that sounds like a punch in the gut. 

 

BUT

 

You guys (probably) will eventually make the decision to chop your built-in one nevertheless. Why?

 

1-Because HDRP allows for a huge amount of graphics options for developers. 

2-HDRP supports DLSS natively. And 7dtd needs all the performance it can get.

3-HDRP supports Ray Tracing. 

 

 

Downsides to HDRP are training for artists and programmers, which might take a few weeks. That's a big one.

7dtd is a heavily cpu bound game, the extra performance of solutions like dlss come into play with the gpu not having to render the game at full Res. So it's benifit in 7dtd would be limited at best. Also dlss is only available as far as I know on 2000 and 3000 series gpus, so if you have a modern gpu you're not going to benifit from the performance uplift of having the gpu do less work, since mid to high range gpus don't even get full utilisation at full res as it is, due to being cpu bound. 

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Any chance you guys could issue a unique token to each player as they login that would be required to be appended to their data stream back to the server?  That way you can reject any input that isn't essentially signed.  Something that can't be discovered by another player.  Unless, you are doing a full broadcast of all data packets to all clients then it would be moot.  I'm fighting people using impersonation of an admin to execute elevated permission commands.  That isn't the only exploit channel, however, it does seem to be one of the easier ones.  If I'm missing something here, please educate me as I like better answers/solutions than what I can imagine.

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4 hours ago, Blake_ said:

BUT

 

You guys (probably) will eventually make the decision to chop your built-in one nevertheless.

 

No duh.

 

On 7/16/2021 at 3:42 PM, faatal said:

It does not mean anything except our next game will probably be HDRP.

 

Eventually = future game.

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4 hours ago, Naz said:

7dtd is a heavily cpu bound game, the extra performance of solutions like dlss come into play with the gpu not having to render the game at full Res. So it's benifit in 7dtd would be limited at best. Also dlss is only available as far as I know on 2000 and 3000 series gpus, so if you have a modern gpu you're not going to benifit from the performance uplift of having the gpu do less work, since mid to high range gpus don't even get full utilisation at full res as it is, due to being cpu bound. 

That's true. The benefits are limited.

 

Spoiler

About the 2000 and 3000 series.... well.... I don't think that by the time 7dtd goes gold (~2024) they can still be considered a rarity and/or a specific marketing feature.  We should asume that by 2023-2024, GPUs will have well stablished AI rendering solutions. And AI rendering might also happen in separate specialized processing units for AMD and the new INTEL dedicated GPUs, like DLSS does now for Nvidia. Maybe it will help fps to 50% of the playerbase as opposed to barely a ~12% (Rtx Steam owners) right now.

 

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

 

But the most important thing is human nature. Will you upgrade your car to one with wheels or one without them that doesn't even hover? (Something very cheap in the rtx market WILL be here by 2023). So Dlss Is the new standard. It's not a new Vulkan. It's a new Pentium 4 (weird unrelated metaphor, but you get the point, one is bland, the other is completely necessary).

 

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6 hours ago, Naz said:

7dtd is a heavily cpu bound game, the extra performance of solutions like dlss come into play with the gpu not having to render the game at full Res. So it's benifit in 7dtd would be limited at best. Also dlss is only available as far as I know on 2000 and 3000 series gpus, so if you have a modern gpu you're not going to benifit from the performance uplift of having the gpu do less work, since mid to high range gpus don't even get full utilisation at full res as it is, due to being cpu bound. 

That is generally true, but not all the time. At 4k on a RTX 2070 with higher video settings I become GPU bound, so end up turning some video settings down. DLSS would potentially save some GPU, giving a higher FPS without having to turn down some settings.

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4 hours ago, faatal said:

That is generally true, but not all the time. At 4k on a RTX 2070 with higher video settings I become GPU bound, so end up turning some video settings down. DLSS would potentially save some GPU, giving a higher FPS without having to turn down some settings.

Agreed, it's not impossible to get gpu bound in 7dtd. However many players will run at 1440p and 1080p to get higher refresh rates over resolution and it's those common resolutions that are more likely to be cpu bound. 

 

I've tested the

3090(cpu bound at 4k)

1080ti sli (cpu bound at 4k)

Single 1080ti (cpu bound at 1440p)

1080 (cpu bound at 1440p)

980ti (cpu bound at 1080p)

R9 295x2 (been a while can't recall) 

1060 (been a while can't recall) 

750ti (been a while can't recall)

 

So while some older cards could benifit from dlss, they're to old to support the feature. Modern cards that do would need to be running at 4k to have a chance at any performance benifit and sometimes even then it will still be cpu bound at full Res. I've seen a couple cases of the 3080 reported similary as the 3090 which makes sence since they're not far off each other in terms of performance.

 

I haven't tested lower in the 3000 stack or anything in the 2000 series, so I can't say for certain. But it's my opinion the cases where dlss would benifit people would be in the minority. I think some people would turn it on and play with slightly worst image quality, when it would be unesseseary in cpu scenarios. 

 

 

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